If folk and classical music don’t move you, then let me recommend something that may be more to your taste: Fingertips. Fingertips claims to be the intelligent guide to free and legal music online. That is not an idle boast. Each week, the author identifies (from the vast quantity of promotional tracks and other online music) what he considers new, innovative and exciting. They do not fit cleanly into any genre but do all deserve to be considered. Each recommendation comes with a short and helpful review of the track.
Archive for April, 2006
There are some excellent musicians who are happy to release their music to the public, free of charge. I plan to mention a few through the next few days.
If you’re fond of folk music, there is some excellent music available at the Community Music Project. The performers come from varied backgrounds, some of which make themselves felt in the music. One is of the Bahá’í faith, for example. In general, a clear devotion to nature is transparently evident in the songs. Their vocal talents are often impressive, but the best way to listen to their albums is with the tolerance one shows for a younger sibling. That is their aim, after all: to expand our notions of community and family in a digital age.
I’m grateful to Steve McCoy for pointing me to a talk on hospitality by Mark Driscoll, pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Mark spoke at length on the virtues of hospitality. Hospitality, he said, was ultimately offering a gift to others, and therefore traced our hospitality as Christians back to Jesus’ gift to us on the cross. But he also identifies friendliness to strangers as hospitality. Chattiness in a crowded lift, he suggested, might be a good way to be hospitable.
Lilith 0
George Macdonald wrote a number of books that explore the imaginative ways of expressing Christian truths. Most notable among these are At the Back of the North Wind, Phantastes and Lilith. C.S. Lewis was profoundly influenced by Phantastes, which he described as baptising his imagination. According to Lewis, it gave him a new way to perceive the world. He wrote:
It can be very easy to begin to think that salvation is cheap, or even that it is deserved. “Well, of course a loving God should save people.” Indeed, often the question that is asked is why God doesn’t save everyone. There’s a lovely passage from Piers Plowman that begins to capture the impossibility of salvation:
I particularly enjoy my periodic visits to Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. The preaching is solidly based on the Bible and the church family is warm and welcoming. The senior pastor at CHBC, Mark Dever, is well-connected with the church in England, having spent some time in Cambridge while taking his doctorate.
